Talk about a nation at a cross-roads. I guess my last story just tipped them over the edge. They’ve taken a right onto the interstate.

That photo just kills me. Remember the line from the last one,

When Kazakhstan’s democracy-shy president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, makes his stately progress to meet President Bush at the White House today, he may catch a glimpse of an ill-dressed television reporter vigorously protesting the rudeness of the British actor and comedian, Sacha Baron Cohen.

The Russian Soyuz space capsule carrying Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian-born telecoms entrepreneur from Texas, and two male astronauts bumped down on the steppes of Kazakhstan at 0214 BST, suspended from a large orange and white parachute.

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Borat issued an invitation last night to “George Walter Bush and other American dignitaries, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Gates, O. J. Simpsons and Mel Gibsons”, to a private screening of his new “moviefilm”, Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which will have its British premiere at The Times BFI London Film Festival next month.

The US event, would, he promised, be followed by a cocktail party at a Hooters restaurant, a chain famed for scantily clad, heavily cleavaged waitresses serving cheap chicken wings and beer.

Borat — the film had its premiere at the recent Toronto festival and opens in November — has developed a huge following in the US.

The film includes lines such as: “We have many hobbies: disco dancing, archery, rape and table tennis.” Other pastimes include “the running of the Jews” and “dog-shooting”.

Borat hit back by staging an impromptu press conference outside Kazakhstan’s Embassy on Thursday. “These are disgusting fabrications,” he said, waving the newspaper advertisement, claiming it was perpetrated by “evil nitwits” from neighbouring Uzbekistan.

“If there is one more item of Uzbek propaganda claiming that we do not drink fermented horse urine, give death penalty for baking bagels, or export over 300 tonnes of human pubis per year, then we will be left with no alternative but to commence bombardment of their cities with our catapults.”

Kazakhstan’s Foreign Minister has, without any intended self-irony, made similar suggestions that Cohen, who is Jewish, may be “acting on behalf of someone’s political order” to denigrate the country.